The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’s would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer — which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.
Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.
And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.
The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.
Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.
“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.
“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back — I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases. ”
“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”
“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.
A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”
It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.
The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is, is not good news.
“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.
“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.
“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.
“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”
That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.
“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”
“That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,” she answered dutifully. “To me, it’s been about eight months.”
“Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship … that enemy vessel comes from our future!” He paused to let that sink in.
“As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.
“For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.
“We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.
“I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire … or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.
“At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.
“That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?”
“I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.”
“Dismissed.” And none of this “fuck you, sir” nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention — all except Stott — until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said “dismissed” again, and we left.
My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.
There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.
3
We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.
But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.
But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod-4 and the Tauran home base — so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.
The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.
We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie halfcrushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.
Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of — or safe in the arms of — the logistic computer.
While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.